Intelligent Design

Of course not. Not that you would know from the headline: From Jon Cartwright at New Scientist: Believe it or not, this burst of cosmological inflation, followed by a slower, tamer expansion, is the most sensible way to explain how the universe looks today. But there’s something missing: what did the inflating? The answer could be everywhere, and right under our noses. When a long-sought particle finally appeared a few years back, it seemed to close a chapter in physics without giving any clue about what happens next. Read between the lines, though, as some theorists recently have, and you see that the famous Higgs boson – the particle that gives mass, or inertia, to all other particles – might Read More ›

Quora: “Roger Penrose says, “String theory is fashion, quantum physics is faith, and cosmic inflation is fantasy.” Is he right?” From Brett Harris on the road to reality guy, Roger Penrose: I am getting tired of pointing out that String Theory arose out of particle physicists attempting to quantise the linearised version of GR, normally used in make perturbations to Newton’s laws in the solar system. This produces a free spin-2 graviton at 0th-level, and then they attempt to use first order interactions to construct a full interacting quantum field theory of gravitons – in FLAT space – which has none of the full symmetries of GR, and it fails miserably by throwing up infinities at all orders. Not to Read More ›

Over at ENV, David Klinghoffer reports on an article in Live Science about research into why atheists disproportionately score higher on standard tests of intelligence.  The article states: [Researcher Edward] Dutton set out to find [the] answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if I’d got it wrong, actually,” Dutton told Live Science. “I found evidence that intelligence is positively associated with certain kinds of bias.” For instance, a 2012 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that college students often get logical answers wrong but don’t realize it. Read More ›

IBM Fellow Charles Bennett, (developed Reversible Computation and Quantum Teleportation), on how weird physical phenomena discovered in the early 20th century have taught us the true nature of information, and how to process it: 39:30 minute mark: “Entanglement is ubiquitous: Almost every interaction between two systems creates entanglement between them… Most systems in nature… interact so strongly with the environment as to become entangled with it almost immediately.”… 44:00 minute mark: “A classical communications channel is a quantum communication channel with an eavesdropper (maybe only the environment)… A classical computer is a quantum computer handicapped by having eavesdroppers on all its wires.” See also: Data basic: An introduction to information theory

From Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: The political campaign for the multiverse continues today with a piece by Amanda Gefter at Nautilus. It’s a full-throated salvo from the Linde-Guth side of the multiverse propaganda war they are now waging, with Linde dismissing Steinhardt’s criticism as based on “a total ignorance of what is going on”. All of the quotes for the article are on the pro-multiverse side. There is a new argument from them I’d never heard before: Guth comes up with this one: You can create a universe from nothing—you can create infinite universes from nothing—as long as they all add up to nothing. … The article is subtitled “Why the majority of physicists are on one side Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Now scientists around Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich paleontologist Professor Bettina Reichenbacher have described a new fossil cichlid discovered in Upper Miocene strata in East Africa, which provides new insights into the evolutionary history of the group. Moreover, the results are consistent with molecular genetic data relating to the ongoing diversification of the family in the Great Lakes region of East Africa, which have indicated that hybridization between members of related species or even genera has played a major role in cichlid speciation. The work also sheds light on the environmental conditions that prevailed in the Rift Valley of East Africa in the Upper Miocene period, 9-10 million years ago. The new findings appear in the Journal of Vertebrate Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENV: Two Days After Warning Against “Anti-Science” Label, Nature Calls Academic Freedom “Anti-Science” From the headline of the piece you might think you were reading some online tabloid. But guess again. Published in Nature on May 12 and republished by Scientific American, Erin Ross’s article declares, “Revamped ‘anti-science’ education bills in United States find success.” The headline is describing legislation in Florida and academic freedom resolutions in Alabama and Indiana. The term “anti-science” is ironic. As we noted at Evolution News the other day, Nature itself published a May 10 editorial, “Beware the anti-science label.” It warned against using the term lightly and urged that “Presenting science as a battle for truth against ignorance is an Read More ›

Note to Readers: The past few days on this thread there has been tremendous activity and much discussion about the concept of probability.  I had intended to post this OP months ago, but found it still in my drafts folder yesterday mostly, but not quite fully, complete.  In the interest of highlighting a couple of the issues hinted at in the recent thread, I decided to quickly dust off this post and publish it right away.  This is not intended to be a response to everything in the other thread.  In addition, I have dusted this off rather hastily (hopefully not too hastily), so please let me know if you find any errors in the math or otherwise, and I will be happy Read More ›

A friend writes to mention an online open access journal, Cosmos and History: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of natural and social philosophy. It serves those who see philosophy’s vocation in questioning and challenging prevailing assumptions about ourselves and our place in the world, developing new ways of thinking about physical existence, life, humanity and society, so helping to create the future insofar as thought affects the issue. Philosophy so conceived is not exclusively identified with the work of professional philosophers, and the journal welcomes contributions from philosophically oriented thinkers from all disciplines. More. The article list looks interesting. For example: Now On-line Foundations of Mind IV: Quantum Mechanics Meets Read More ›

From Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience: Bigelow noted during the interview May 28 that his grandparents spotted a UFO on a canyon road outside Las Vegas: “It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and shot off into the distance,” he told “60 Minutes” reporter Lara Logan. “Do you believe in aliens?” Logan asked. “I’m absolutely convinced and that’s all there is to it,” said Bigelow, founder and CEO of the commercial space company Bigelow Aerospace. “There has been and there is an existing presence, an E.T. presence.” When asked if he expects to see forms of intelligent life as humans explore Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Queensland scientists discovered a new type of lymphatic brain “scavenger” cell by studying tropical freshwater zebrafish — which share many of the same cell types and organs as humans. Lead researcher Associate Professor Ben Hogan from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience said the fundamental discovery would help scientists understand how the brain forms and functions. “It is rare to discover a cell type in the brain that we didn’t know about previously, and particularly a cell type that we didn’t expect to be there,” he said. “The brain is the only organ without a known lymphatic system, so the fact that these cells are lymphatic in nature and surround the brain makes this finding quite a Read More ›

Gotten mixed reviews. See what you think. From Pillbug Zone: In a universe driven by targets, a faceless corporation employs you to create an evolving ecosystem you can never hope to control…

Researchers: This system is exceptional in terms of the rates of evolutionary change and adaptive divergence, and it is likely that this may be due to the uncommon circumstances posed by the isolated and fragmented Galápagos landscape. At Molecular Ecology: Abstract: Beak shape in Darwin’s ground finches (Geospiza) is emblematic of natural selection and adaptive radiation, yet our understanding of the genetic basis of beak shape variation, and thus the genetic target of natural selection, is still evolving. Here we reveal the genomic architecture of beak shape variation using genomewide comparisons of four closely related and hybridizing species across 13 islands subject to parallel natural selection. Pairwise contrasts among species were used to identify a large number of genomic loci Read More ›

From Rachel Cernansky at Nature: Biodiversity moves beyond counting species Ecologists are increasingly looking at how richness of traits — rather than number of species — helps set the health of ecosystems. From the article: Biodiversity, it states, doesn’t have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species’ different characteristics and the things they can do — measured in terms of specific traits such as body size or branch length. … “Just going for species numbers basically doesn’t allow us to harness all this incredibly rich information we have of how the real world operates,” says Sandra Díaz, an ecologist with Argentina’s National Scientific Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Evolutionary biologists have long assumed that when an individual of a species wanders into a different environment than it is adapted to, it will be at a competitive disadvantage compared to natives of the same species which are adapted to that environment. Studying fish in Canada, scientists found the opposite. … Evolutionary theory suggests that taking the fish that are adapted to the lake environment and placing them into the stream would put them at a competitive disadvantage compared with the residents. In the dog-eat-dog world of natural selection, outsiders are often poorly adapted to a new environment and less likely to survive or pass on their genes. In the case of the sticklebacks, that’s because the lake-adapted Read More ›